I don’t mean photorealism, but most art throughout civilizations has been highly stylized – each period and culture can pretty much be told apart by the art style, whereas today there’s infinite variation between individual artists. Shouldn’t realism be the first thing people try since it’s all around us? How did seemingly all art in history from different periods and cultures become so homogenic and specific to their eras?
In: Culture
Great question! I am only an amateur art historian, so corroborate my statements here.
1. Plenty of older artistic traditions did focus on realistic human figures — ancient Greek sculpture, Italian Renaissance painting, the Dutch masters, etc. Other traditions strove for realistic depictions of landscapes or buildings, like during the Chinese Song Dynasty.
2. Art isn’t as homogenous within cultures as it might seem at first. Within every tradition, you’ve got artists challenging and complicating it. However, it’s important to be aware that in most cultures throughout history, being a professional artist required some sort of official sanction. You’d either need to be part of a religious order, or sponsored by a rich patron, or you’d be the court painter or sculptor for a monarch; you’d be much less likely to just create and sell your art on the open market. This means that much of the art that reaches us from the past is, in some way, “approved.”
3. Most cultures determined the value of a piece of art by standards other than realism. For example, folk art created by the lower classes might be used for religious purposes, in which case its stylization was a way to grant it ritual power. This is one proposed reason for the earliest cave paintings — people would hit the painted animals with spears and arrows in order to make their hunt for real animals more successful.
4. The easiest way to learn to draw, paint, or sculpt isn’t to look at examples of the thing you’re trying to depict; it’s to look at the ways other people have depicted that thing. Without access to Google, you’re mostly going to reference other works that already exist within your local traditions.
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